Saturday, April 22, 2017

A Horrible Human Being Rises to the Top: AG Jeff Sessions Adopts All-Out Lying as a Legal Tactic

Hearing that Miami-Dade may have collapsed under the contemptible pressure tactics of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was disheartening. I hold out hope and expectations that other urban areas will be savvy enough to understand that Sessions' club is made of paper mâché.

What makes guys like this tick? Utter, outright racism. It's not complicated.

No, it's not complicated finding the motivation for an attorney general who was once denied the federal bench for being the racist that he is. But what stretches the imagination is that Sessions would imitate his boss, Donald Trump, whose pathological lying has gotten him to the White House with little other gear to help him get anything done.

And yet here we are, with Sessions threatening to withhold federal grants and such from jurisdictions that make themselves sanctuaries for undocumented workers. Nothing less than the Supreme Court has weighed in on such tactics -- on a number of cases -- and so Sessions should understand that he's already on thin ice. But that's not stopping him:

We’re familiar with President Trump’s dystopian
vision of an America in chaos, preyed on by foreigners and awash in
citizens violated by feral criminals and “illegals.” Through last year’s
campaign and into this year, Trump has repeatedly lied about the
national crime rate, murder rates and much more. Here though is a case
where anti-immigrant policies continue to be justified by at least
deliberately misleading statements and what can only be called
incitement.

Here’s a statement released today by the Justice Department,
justifying a letter sent out to nine so-called “sanctuary cities”
threatening loss of federal funds if they don’t collaborate and assist
Trump administration immigration policies.
Here’s the second paragraph (emphasis added) …

Additionally, many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime. The number of murders in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s “soft on crime” stance.
And just several weeks ago in California’s Bay Area, after a raid
captured 11 MS-13 members on charges including murder, extortion and
drug trafficking, city officials seemed more concerned with reassuring
illegal immigrants that the raid was unrelated to immigration than with
warning other MS-13 members that they were next.

The second highlighted sentence doesn’t explicitly say the murder
rate continues to rise in New York City. But that is certainly the
intended impression, along with the dig at ‘soft on crime’ policies.

Read the rest of Josh Marshall's piece to discover what obvious horseshit these claims are. Crime and murder are way down, especially in New York City, and in any event undocumented workers commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.

Just to be clear, there's method to the madness of sanctuary cities. Not only is it a humane way to deal with a problem that's not going away anytime soon, but it's actually a law enforcement tool to reduce crime. NPR had a good piece on this:

But the available data on crime, immigration, and safety in cities does not support the premise for the president's actions. News outlets and
researchers pointed out during the presidential campaign that
immigrants who are in the country illegally are less likely to commit
crimes or be incarcerated than the general population. The American
Immigration Council noted in a 2015 study
that the recent period of rising immigration to the United States from
1990 to 2013 also corresponded with plummeting crime rates across the
country.

This past Thursday, a new study conducted Tom K. Wong,
a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, found
that there are broad benefits for local jurisdictions that resist
cooperating with federal immigration enforcement — they are safer in the
aggregate and enjoy stronger economies. "For the first time we're kind
of seeing that crime rates are lower when localities stay out of the
business of federal immigration enforcement," Wong said.

You'd think an attorney general would want that. You'd be wrong.

We'll see if Sessions pulls off this corrupt bit of Kabuki theater. I say no. Will he become the newest resident of Bullshit Mountain, as Jon Stewart used to call it? It's pretty obvious he already has.

About the American Human

The American Human is written by Calvin Ross, a retired teacher who at various points in life has been a musician, woodworker, restaurateur, narrator, English teacher in Japan, novelist, technology journalist, and private tutor to Japanese children here in the U.S.

Happily residing in the wine country of Sonoma County north of San Francisco, Calvin has lived in the Philippines, the Netherlands, and the aforementioned Japan, as well as in Chicago, Colorado, Georgia, and many different towns in California, including, of all places, the Mojave Desert.

Calvin, you may note quickly, is a liberal progressive who doesn't think being called a socialist is all that bad, especially since he sort of would like living in Denmark if it weren't so cold. He blogs because he can.